First came the Information Age, then came the Information Overload Age. That’s the age far too many businesses are currently living in, the one where data and analytics reign supreme…even at the expense customer service, customer satisfaction and, ultimately, revenue.
With so many customer service metrics able to be efficiently and accurately tracked, many organizations fall into the trap of tracking anything and everything simply because they can. But when it comes to key performance indicators, or KPIs, there is one important question organizations need to ask: what have you done for me lately?
Assessing your metrics
Okay, what have you done for me lately isn’t actually a specific enough question for deciding if your organization is going to continue using a KPI, and when it comes to KPIs, you want to be specific. Try assessing your KPIs with these questions instead.
1. What is the goal attached to this KPI? KPIs should have a quantifiable goal as well as a timeframe in which that goal is to be achieved. If this isn’t true for each and every one of your KPIs, why are you tracking them? If a KPI isn’t set up to have an impact on your business, it either needs to be eliminated or re-thought.
2. What is the action associated with this KPI? This question can actually be separated into two separate ones: if the key performance indicator is tracking negatively, what action should be taken? If it’s tracking positively, what action should be taken? If neither answer is clear, what data-driven insights are you really gaining? If they’re not actionable, they might not be worthwhile.
3. Does everyone understand what this KPI means? Does everyone involved in a KPI understand what it actually means? A KPI needs a single and clear definition, and if this is lacking it could be a sign that a KPI is too complicated to be useful.
4. Does everyone trust this KPI’s data? If you’re going to ask employees to buy into a KPI and possibly even base part of their performance evaluations or compensation on it, that KPI’s data source needs to be reliable as well as fully visible. With less than accurate data, as hard as your employees may try – a KPI will be garbage in, garbage out, and their trust will be diminished.
Key performance indicators, take two
To build (or rebuild) effective KPIs, there are a few steps to take. The first step is to determine what the goals or objectives of the organization are when it comes to customer service. Increase retention? Decrease churn? Increase engagement? Increase word of mouth? The goals your organization is working towards are what determine relevant key performance indicators.
Next you need to determine exactly where the organization currently is when it comes to these goals and objectives. Having a realistic and quantifiable picture of where the organization stands provides a valuable baseline for measuring improvements.
Once those two steps have been taken, you can begin selecting key performance indicators that will measure the success of the organization in regards to the goals and objectives that have been identified. To make sure the selected KPIs are going to be useful, run through the four questions listed above. What are the specific goals associated with this KPI and what are the timeframes for achieving them? What actions will be taken as a result of what the key performance indicators indicate? Does everyone involved understand the KPI? Where is the data coming from, and is it reliable?
A selection of effective customer service KPIs
There is a tremendous number of customer service KPIs. Some useful, some not, some interesting but not actionable, some a complete waste of time. It isn’t always easy to immediately discern the difference. Fortunately, the experts at customer service solutions provider Nanorep have assembled a list of some of the top customer service KPIs and metrics. These include:
Response time to first reply. This measures how long it takes for a customer to receive his or her first reply to a customer service inquiry. No one likes to be kept waiting, and keeping the response time to first reply short demonstrates that the organization respects a customer’s time.
Resolution of customer cases. This KPI reveals not only what percentage of customer issues are being successfully resolved, but how long it takes to get to that resolution – two good indicators of how effectively and efficiently customers are being served.
Social media efficiency. The pressure’s on when it comes to customers making contact over social media because this contact is made publicly, and that public can see how long it takes for the organization to reply, and how effective the reply is. Social media efficiency KPIs measure important factors like how quickly social media responses are being issued, and how often customer service cases have to be rerouted to another channel.
Careful curation
The saying the more the merrier may apply to many things in life, but customer service KPIs aren’t one of them. All information overload does is muddle the important insights that can be provided by KPIs and make it difficult to take action based on those insights. With a slight reworking of the saying to, perhaps, the more carefully selected, thoroughly developed and concretely actionable the merrier, we might really have something.
